A point for those doing the Invisibles:
It is non-targeted if we work from an image. This does not mean that we have to go into a story using ONLY the image as the sole point of departure with the class into the story. In the Town Meeting (Questioning Level 1) we can look through a stack of individually drawn images with the character we want to work with picked out in our mind in advance, before we bring the entire stack in front of the class during the Town Meeting to seemingly “pick” a character from the stack. It’s o.k. to have the image picked out beforehand – it’s not cheating to craft possible story lines with an individually drawn character that we are going to use in the story. It gives us safety, a back up story line, as it were, for when we get to QL5 of the story. Some people may think that NT means no planning out a possible plan for a story, just winging it, but it only means not targeting any words, not connecting our instruction to a high frequency word list, backwards planning list, thematic unit, or list of any kind. Not aligning our instruction with a curriculum is a big plus because it frees up our CI instruction by (a) aligning our instruction with the research about how people acquire languages and (b) creating much more iinteresting, far less boring, stories. Planning a story line in advance before the Town Meeting is a good idea. Often the story goes off in its own direction anyway. We have to be ready for whatever happens, just as in regular TPRS. Planning a story line in advance gives us a bit of security, should we need it when we get to Questioning Level 5. I like security when building a story. That is why we have the questioning levels in the first place.
